The manufacturing and distribution of movies for viewing in the home is one of the largest industries in the world. The rental and sale of movies on videotape is a constantly growing industry amounting to over $15 billion dollars in software sales in the United States in 1995. The most popular medium for distributing movies to the home is by standard VHS videotape although other formats and mediums are available. One of the reasons for the robust market for movies on videotape is the established base of videocassette recorders (VCR) in peoples homes. This helps fuel an industry of local videotape rental and sale outlets around the country and worldwide.
The VHS videotape format is the most popular videotape format in the world and the longevity of this standard is assured due to the sheer numbers of VHS videocassette players installed worldwide. However, there are other mediums for distributing movies such as laser disk and 8 mm tape. In the near future, Digital Versatile Disk (DVD) technology will probably replace some of the currently used mediums since a higher quality of video and audio would be available through digital encoding on such a disk. Yet another medium for distributing movies to the home is through cable television networks currently providing pay-per-view capabilities and in the near future, direct video on-demand.
For the consumer, the experience of renting or buying a videotape is often frustrating due to the unavailability of the desired titles. Movie rental and sales statistics show that close to 50% of all consumers visiting a video outlet store do not find the title that they desire and either end up renting or buying an alternate title or not purchasing anything at all. This is due to the limited space for stocking many movie titles within the physical confines of the store. With limited inventory, video stores can only supply the most popular titles or a small number of select titles. Increasing the inventory of movie titles is in direct proportion to the shelf capacity of any one video store.
Direct video distribution to the home is also limited by the availability of select and limited titles at predefined times. Pay-per-view services typically play a limited fare of titles at predefined times offering the consumer a very short list of options for movie viewing in the home. Video on-demand to the home is limited by the cable television head end facilities in its capacity to store a limited number of titles locally.
All of the aforementioned mechanisms for distributing movies to the consumer suffer from inventory limitations. An untapped demand in movie distribution results if the inventory to the consumer can be made large enough and efficient enough to produce movies on-demand in whatever format the consumer desires. There is a need in the art, therefore, for the ability to deliver movies on-demand with a virtually unlimited library of movies on any number of mediums such as VHS videotape, 8 mm videotape, recordable laser disk or DVD technology.
Some systems have addressed the need for distribution of digital information for local manufacturing, sale and distribution. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,418,713 to Allen described a system for on-demand data delivery and reproduction of program material at a remote site. This system describes a central site which stores digitized information such as digital video game information which can be downloaded to a manufacturing site for storage onto, for example, a blank video game cartridge. The manufactured game cartridge can be ordered on-demand from a large variety of titles and delivered to the consumer within a matter of minutes. The shortcomings of the system described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,418,713 is the inability to download and manufacture or distribute large volumes of digital information such as would be required for the downloading, distribution or manufacturing of fall motion, full length video movies.
Another method of delivering information is U.S. Pat. No. 4,528,643 to Freeny Jr. This system provides information to a remote manufacturing machine located on a point of sale location. This system is mainly directed to reproducing pre-recorded music titles on eight-track tapes. The system also suffers from the inability to distribute large volume of digital data necessary for full motion full length movies on videotape and the like and lacks the ability to produce a videotape at high speeds.
A limited number of systems are also known in the art for writing videotaped information at speeds greater than the normal playback speeds. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,872,070 to Cooper et al. describes a system and method for high speed videotape reproduction. The source of the video information for reproduction is from a laser disc player which is specially equipped with two optical read heads. The optical disc player also rotates the disc at twice the standard speed allowing information to be read from the optical disc at four times its standard playback rate. In a similar fashion, the helical scan videotape recorder unit has two write head pairs for writing the video information on the videotape and parallel while the tape is moved at twice its normal speed thus producing a 4.times. write capability. This system lacks the ability to write videotapes at higher than four times their normal viewing speed and requires that the video information come from a video disc player. Although two parallel video signal paths are described, the system lacks the ability to decompress video images from a compressed video file format.
Another system known in the art for writing videotape at a speed faster than the normal viewing speed is found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,065,258 to Warren et al. This system is an analog to analog system in which an analog videotape is played at a higher than normal speed and the signals therefrom are recorded by a second video recorder at the same higher than normal viewing speed. This system lacks the ability to write videotapes at more than twice the normal viewing speed and lacks the ability to process parallel streams of video data from a compressed file format.
Another type of video duplication device is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,260,800 to Sturm et al. This system duplicates video cassette tapes at twice the normal viewing speed. The source video information comes from modified video disc players which operate at twice the normal NTSC video format speed. The video and audio information is converted to analog signals which are written at twice the normal viewing speed by a modified VHS video cassette recorder. This system lacks the ability to duplicate a videotape at anything more than twice the normal viewing speed and operates only in the analog domain. This system lacks the ability to write video cassette tapes using parallel data streams of compressed data from a digitally encoded file.
There is a need in the art, therefore, for a method and system of distributing large volumes of digital information representing full length, full motion movies in a video format to remote locations for on-demand purchase or rental. This need in the art is directed both to on-demand video distribution through cable television headends or through the availability and manufacturing of movie titles on videotape or other medium at video rental retail outlets. There is also a need in the art to track the distribution of a large number of movie titles for accounting and copyright compliance. There is a further need in the art for the automated inventory tracking and billing for the distribution of a large volume of titles for movies. There is a further need in the art for manufacturing video tapes at many times the normal viewing speed from digitally compressed and stored data files.